GENIUS AND MENTAL DISEASE. 675 



Beneke, aud Chatterton stand almost alone in this list, the support 

 for the assumption is not strong, nor is it enhanced if the quality of 

 genius thus represented is duly estimated. 



Those who would make genius dependent upon or associated with 

 a morbid mental state, seek to strengthen their position by citing the 

 names of Burke, Chatham, Linna?us, Moore, Southey, Scott, Swift, and 

 Shelley, as among those whose faculties were impaired by mental dis- 

 ease. I interpret the facts differently. 



It is true that Linnaeus at the age of sixty failed in memory, and 

 that, when nearly seventy, an attack of apoplexy ruined his mind ; 

 that Moore, Southey, and Scott, when the years of their life were 

 nearly numbered, were enfeebled in mind, because in old age the work 

 of repair had failed ; while Swift, at threescore years and ten, lost his 

 mental powers as a result of a disease which began long years before, 

 not in the brain, but in the organ of hearing. 



Shelley, indeed, was eccentric and given to sleep-walking and hal- 

 lucinations, and at times he may have confounded the mythical with 

 the real, seeing " forms more real than living man," but I know of no 

 rule of psychology or of medical jurisprudence which will authorize us 

 to say he was insane. His fervor, his reason, and his imagination con- 

 spired to lift him into the higher realms of an idealism which was the 

 antithesis of things as commonly seen, and his mind grew and strength- 

 ened until, at the age of thirty years, obedient to the " infinite malice 

 of destiny," he died. 



Because Lord Chatham suffered at one time from melancholy, the 

 direct result of suppressed gout, it in no way proves that his genius 

 was allied with madness, for the same clinical facts are observed in all 

 orders of mind. 



Since, therefore, every degree of mental disorder from the simplest 

 feeling of depression to the wildest mania, regardless of the quality of 

 mind, may follow from the undue retention in the blood of the waste 

 products of tissue-change, either alone or combined with other morbid 

 bodily conditions, there seems to be but little justification in asserting 

 that " there is no great genius without a mixture of insanity." 



In the history of political literature the name of Edmund Burke 

 stands among the first, and is representative not only of that illuminat- 

 ing power which belongs to lofty minds, but of the genius which comes 

 " as the consummation of the faculty of taking pains." Year after 

 year his voice sounded in behalf of the "sacredness of law, the free- 

 dom of nations, the justice of rulers," and the imagery of his thought 

 — imposing in its majesty — " carries us into regions of enduring wis- 

 dom." For nearly threescore years his mind retained the dignity and 

 calm of lofty greatness, and seemed to totter from its balance only 

 when he breathed the torrid heat of fury which was sweeping over 

 France and gathering wrath against the horrid atrocities of " '89." 

 He had before him the vision of Marie Antoinette, "glittering like the 



